If you haven't started, you can now. And if you have started, it's time to put pare documents using a wayback machine. Legacy Information Management is something very few companies are doing, but which makes a great deal of sense. Double down on cutting back.

I wish I could write a proper obit for John Updike, but even Nicholson Baker probably can't. In Baker's book "U and Me," he realizes he'll never write as well as Updike. Frankly, that's a bit like realizing that one could never create worlds as effectively as God.

I read Updike because my parents suggested him. I remember first running into him when I couldn't get a question right in Battle of the Brains practice -- first sentences of novels. It's about basketball, which figures in the last scene of the fourth book of the series.

I read the book, eventually. I read lots of them, and felt a personal connection to Updike that he affirmed with his kindness at a book signing in 1987 or 1988, when I asked he sign a number of books I had of his -- as well as my professor's copies. (My professor saw I was forward of him in the line and asked me to convey his books to the great man, which I did cheerfully, and as a result, I passed the course possibly without deserving it. Shakespeare. 'Nuff said.)

I loved Updike's work. Every time there was a new one, it was a date. I imagined his descriptions of filth, papercut pornographic details dealt out in tragic solitaire. I imagined that this is what it is like. I wanted to grow up to battle the misery and avoid it. Some of it, I did. Some, I didn't.

Always, at every turn, if I let myself inhale all the way, the dust of his prose would whirl down my lungs.

At the book signing I went to -- not the one in this nice Flickr picture from a year ago -- Updike listened to me chatter briefly while he wrote his name in old paperbacks and new copies of his then-current work. He asked if I wrote -- I had probably said something in Tagalog at that moment as my brain cells fused into a glassy knot of incomprehension that led him to suspect I worshiped him -- and I said I hoped to. I admitted I hadn't found my voice. (Still haven't.)

He told me to keep writing. He told me -- this man who had found his voice when he was practically in short pants, a prodigy who became a virtuoso -- I would find it.

I remember I had started to walk away when he said it. He turned his head and shoulders to say it while I walked, to keep me in view, to give me the gift of his gaze. I don't know...maybe it seems ridiculous, now, that the touch of his look meant so much to me, but it still does, after all these years. (About 20, since you're asking.)

I believe he was the greatest writer of his generation. His books risked and risked and risked, and I loved them for that.

One of Joe's teachers has heard of the soups we make here Chez Dad, and asked for the recipe. I admitted it would be difficult. I have been making soups with varying degrees of success since 1990, and I admit now and to anyone listening that it was definitely a mistake, for example, the time I made soup from a recipe that called for a chicken to be simmered for hours. That part was fine; it was when I got to the end -- "Discard the chicken" -- that I should have averted my eyes.

But my soup-making has taken a more fervid turn since I took a cooking class near Lyon, when I learned that soup is to be made over days. The chef explained a variety of things: Any vegetable can be part of the stock, as long as it's not too starchy; any poultry or meat can be a part of the stock, as long as it's not gone bad; you can and should cook the stock for many, many hours, and probably days.

What I learned in the class, most of all, was: Don't be afraid of your soup.

This was good advice.

Following that, my friend in Cancale, France, explained that she keeps a "soup box" in her freezer, into which she tosses the trimmings and extras of her vegetables. I do the same thing, now -- I have a plastic tub into which I drop the peels from carrots, onion peels, celery ends, cores from Brussels sprouts, and so forth. It fills up faster than you would think. In essence, you are always thinking soup, and also, obviously, total use of the vegetables you're eating. The Sioux used all the bison; the soup box lets you use every scrap of vegetable that gets cut. I drop in meat trimmings, too, even the fatty bits, because I skim most of the fat off, eventually. Depending on how secret your cooking process is, you can even drop in table scraps from people's plates, because everything is going to get boiled, and those bones and bits are precious. If I ran into a bison out on Maple Avenue, and it was looking poorly, I would use all of it in soup.

(And nobody has to eat pemmican. Everybody wins.)

OK, so, now you have the context for my soup. It's time now to look at the recipe, such as it is. It continues after the jump. (That means click to see the rest of this entry.)

I bet a lot of you were introduced to Aretha the same way that I was: Thanks to John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, she popped into my life behind a diner counter in The Blues Brothers. I remember I came home and told my parents about this crazy movie where there was an old guy who played an organ in the street -- wasn't Ray Charles, like, famous? -- and a woman who sang a song called, "Think!" and there were also righteous car chases.

We are not born understanding Soul. Sort of. Perhaps we also are. Because certainly, I bought a cassette copy of the movie soundtrack as part of my subscription to the CBS record club (thank you very much, Mr. Postman, for folding my Yaz "Breakfast at Eric's" LP to fit it in the mailbox so that it skipped for years until gravity and inclusion in a large stack of records made it just a little hooply and a littel listenable).

In any event, I have come home to Aretha -- so fine a singer that no critic has ever doodled, as they seem to about every other smart female singer that she is "possibly the next Billie Holliday," including the poor lead singer to the delightful but in no way eternal Squirrel Nut Zippers. I was listening to Aretha's two entries on 1,000 Recordings off and on along with my other sudden educations into other aspects of R&B and Soul, and has been delighted at the secular music but shocked into joy at the gospel (and I am not among the faithful).

My parents told me not to miss her singing at the Inaguration today, and I was delighted to be able to simply grab it from CNN (thanks, Ted -- that news network idea might catch on, ya think?) and fire it up. (Oh lord she's singing "Precious Lord, Take My Hand/You've Got a Friend" and it's like somebody's carrying you around and showing you the view out the upper windows.)

Aretha is perfectly inclusive. Any of us can listen to Aretha. Good heaven, there are karaoke versions of Aretha songs, and can you please for the love of all that is holy tell me who can do Aretha in any way, shape or form? She sang with Annie Lennox. There is a category on my music service titled "Aretha Franklin duets." Listening to this record -- the gospel of the two on 1,000 recordings -- is deeply moving. Here she is, at the front of the church, and you can hear the pews rising up with delight and welcome. they all know her; this is her father's church, and she has presumably come back to the scene of her earliest triumphs (at one point, her father reminds the audience she first sang a particular song before them).

Scott McCloudProbably the best-known thinker about comic strips/books/graphic novels/sequential art working right now. Controversial among comic fans but unequivocally an influential and original thinker.